I’d never send my kids to single sex schools. Why would I? Look what they did to my husband…

When my husband and I had our first son, I laid down just one rule: under no circumstances would we send him to an all-boys school. I mean it – I’m with Princess Kate.

I love my spouse, but it’s fair to say that attending two single-sex British private schools made him the ill-adjusted, borderline misanthrope he is today – and he would be the first to agree. I often say his schooldays were like The Lord of the Flies, only worse. “Boys will be boys,” in that context, often means weird initiation rites.

My spouse was tied to a log and floated out on a school lake where he very nearly drowned. This brutal all-male ritualist shtick is still routinely seen in university “hazing” sessions – particularly student rugby clubs run by (yup) young men who went to boys’ schools.

It’s notable how often posh men who end up going to prison (Jonathan Aitken springs to mind) reflect that jail takes them back to their schooldays. I have never heard a well-educated woman prisoner say that.

So, I applaud the Princess of Wales, or the woman formerly known as Kate, in her apparent decision to send Prince George to her alma mater, Marlborough College, rather than William’s former establishment, Eton College.

She will have had plenty of opportunity to observe whether single-sex education for boys (as experienced by William and Harry, their dad Charles and uncles Andrew and Edward) is, on balance, likely to turn out men who are well-rounded, happy individuals, at ease with women of all types.

It’s certainly likely to turn out blokes who feel they’re destined to rule the world, but since George is actually destined “long to reign over us”, he hardly needs that reassurance.

On the other hand, George may require continued schooling alongside girls (he’s already at a co-ed prep) to acquire the kind of social ease that comes from not believing women are “the great other”.

What do I mean by that? Here’s an example from my own education: I was once walking across the snow-covered grounds of my Oxford college by night with a woman friend as a male contemporary, schooled at Eton, was striding towards us.

As our paths crossed we both heard him utter – seemingly to the moon – “Horrible women, they are melting the snow.” It really did feel as if our living, breathing femaleness, with wombs that gushed blood and forged life, were a terrifying affront to him. An attitude that, back in the far-off 1980s, wasn’t uncommon at High Table either.

The long-established tradition in all-male schools is to teach boys to be self-reliant and resilient, yet simultaneously resilient and regimented (woe betide anyone who isn’t a team player). Above all else: dutiful. In other words, they are schooled in the qualities required for embryonic soldiers and empire builders.

However, in practice, this could also mean young men who had no real knowledge of women outside their mothers (most boys’ schools have the implied motto “cut the apron strings!”) and maybe a school matron. No sense that women can be equals, friends, companions and even – shock, horror – funny. To this day, way too many men think that a GSOH in a female means “laughs at all my jokes”.

I hate to talk in clichés, but it really does seem to me that women knock the rough edges off men. I live in a household of males – spouse, two teenage sons, ginger Tom – and I often speculate what they’d be like if I was hit by a bus, since they’re bad enough with me constantly doing low-level monitoring of their sexism.

And my tolerance for testosterone and blokiness is notoriously high, as the former editor of an erotic literary magazine. Even so, I was taken aback when my younger boy asked me, aged six, if women “were allowed to drive buses.”

I noted both my boys always assumed doctors would be men when young and they tended to defer to their dad, even though I’ve long been the main wage-earner. And although I gave them a dolls’ house, alongside a wooden castle, the chatelaine of the small house was found tied to the bed with layers of string.

As they grew older, I became Medusa-like with fury if they used the word “pussy” to mean coward – though I’m relieved to say I have never heard either of them use terms like “sl*t” or “sl*g”, probably because they know they’d be disinherited. And partly because their large circle of clever, strong female friends would deck them if they did.

Despite my constant “softening” of my boys’ more testosterone-charged impulses, I fight to have space in my own house. Every inch is covered with trainers, basketballs, hoodies, gaming consoles and speakers for rap that blasts 24/7, with lyrics that often make me want to weep at the blatant misogyny.

This boy stuff is beginning to squeeze out my husband’s huge collection of Bob Dylan CDs, his row-upon-row of big battle books, or tomes on the Cathars. Even squeezing the allotted space given up to scale models of Spitfires and Dreadnoughts. I live in the loft, like a cut-price Miss Havisham, surrounded by frocks and books by women authors like Tessa Hadley and Kate Atkinson.

When you think it’s this much of a fight for me – a liberal feminist, who’s firmly part of the professional classes and out-earns her husband – you can see why Kate wants some girl power round her boys at school.

They will, after all, be partly raised in a court tradition that’s still notoriously chauvinistic, where their mum will very likely, one day, have to curtsey to their dad. Ballsy, wisecracking female classmates may be the one thing that stands between them and a lasting impression that women are in some, however underplayed way, second-class citizens.

Whether mixed classrooms are quite as good for the “civilising” girls in them is another issue altogether. Plenty of research still suggests girls might benefit from all-female schooling – perhaps because they’re freed up from putting energy into civilising boys. I can attest to that...